119. Michele Ashby - Pantone 152

2024
Pencil on card
9.7 x 14.2 cm
Signed on Front

For the past ten years, Michele Ashby has worked as a professional artist, creating contemporary realist paintings with a strong sense of narrative and emotional connection. Working primarily in soft pastel, she is drawn to the medium’s immediacy and versatility, using it to create richly atmospheric works defined by dramatic lighting effects including chiaroscuro, contre-jour and en grisaille. Often building her paintings from darkness into light, Ashby uses shadow as both a compositional and emotional device.

Her work seeks a visual honesty that encourages the viewer to pause and look more closely — capturing fleeting moments, relationships and quiet human connections with sensitivity and psychological depth. Through intimate observations and carefully controlled light, Ashby aims to evoke both a sense of presence and something of her own experience of the world.

Ashby studied Graphic Design at Kingston University, graduating with a BA (Hons) in 1985, following a Foundation Course at Colchester Institute of Art (1980–1982).

Recent exhibitions include the Derwent Art Prize at OXO Gallery, London (2026); The British Art Prize, OXO Gallery, London (2025); the Enduring Brilliance exhibitions at the Pastel Society of America, New York (2018–2025); the Butler Museum of American Art, Ohio (2019 and 2023); and numerous exhibitions with the International Association of Pastel Societies. Her work has also been widely exhibited at Mall Galleries, London, including shows with the Pastel Society, the Society of Women Artists, the Society of Graphic Fine Art and the Royal Society of Marine Artists between 2017 and 2026.

Ashby has received extensive recognition for her pastel practice, including Third Prize at The British Art Prize (2025), the Bill Creevy Memorial Award at the Pastel Society of America’s Enduring Brilliance exhibition (2025), and the Daniel Greene Memorial Award (2023). She became a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America in 2018 and was awarded Master Pastellist status in 2021. She is also a Council Member of the Society of Women Artists and a member of the Society of Graphic Fine Art and the Institute of East Anglian Artists.